Excess Deaths from the Coronavirus
According to the Worldometer database, South Korea and the United States both confirmed their first case of Covid19 on January 20, 2020. As of February 11, 2022 South Korea had suffered 7,081 fatalities as a result of this pandemic and the United States 942,944. This works out to 137.9 deaths per million residents in South Korea and 2,822.0 deaths per million residents in the United States. If the United States had handled this pandemic as efficiently as South Korea deaths in the United States would have been 45,889 rather than 942,944. This means that Trump's failed leadership in playing down the virus, declaring the pandemic to be a hoax, pretending the virus is just going to go away, and refusing to set an example by emphasizing the importance of wearing masks, sanitizing, avoiding congregant gatherings, testing and contact tracing, and quarantining and his followers refusal to support these measures or vaccination mandates has led to some 897,055 unnecessary deaths in the United States from this pandemic. Even if the United States had handled the pandemic as poorly as Canada (918 deaths/M) over 633,576 unnecessary deaths could have been avoided.
Those countries that have controlled Covid 19 better than the US have done so by following the standard procedures proscribed by the CDC—hand washing, face masks, testing, contact tracing, quarantining, barring social gatherings, and other kinds of mitigation referred to as 'social distancing'—in the CDC's 2017 Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza and in Obama's Playbook for Early Response to High Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents that was prepared for and passed on to the Trump administration. The refusal face reality and follow these procedures is responsible for the examined above and for the excess deaths compared to other countries as shown in the following Worldometer table:
